Sur­vey to re­mea­sure Ever­est be­gins:

Nepal has be­gun re­mea­sur­ing Mount Ever­est to check if the height of the world’s tallest peak was al­tered by a pow­er­ful earth­quake that struck the na­tion in 2015, the gov­ern­ment said Fri­day.

The of­fi­cial height of Mount Ever­est — which lies in the Hi­malayan range, strad­dling the bor­der be­tween Nepal and China — is 8,848 me­tres (29,029 feet), first recorded by an In­dian sur­vey in 1954.

Nu­mer­ous other teams have mea­sured the peak, al­though the 1954 height re­mains the widely ac­cepted fig­ure.

“Nepal has never mea­sured Ever­est on its own al­though the world’s high­est peak lies in its ter­ri­tory. So we want to prove to our peo­ple that Nepal is ca­pa­ble of mea­sur­ing Ever­est,” Ganesh Prasad Bhatta, head of the gov­ern­ment’s sur­vey de­part­ment, told AFP. A team of Nepali and for­eign ex­perts have be­gun re­fin­ing the method­ol­ogy for the new sur­vey, which is ex­pected to take two years, Bhatta said. (AFP)